


Bad Bad Things

by TheCatfish



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note: Another Note
Genre: B being just generally creepy and sick and just... B, Child Death, Drabble, Gen, Harm to Children, Horror, Insanity, Paranoia, Referenced B/A, i wrote this at 1am and i was in a B mood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 07:18:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14232141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCatfish/pseuds/TheCatfish
Summary: In B's opinion, he is an excellent painter. Though B never did learn the difference between opinion and fact.





	Bad Bad Things

Murder is more of an art than a science, Beyond Birthday thinks to himself in the quiet room in which Quarter Queen’s corpse lay sprawled across the floor. Anyone can club someone over the head with a blunt object. Anyone can drag a knife across the delicate flesh of a human throat. It’s the same way any brainless toddler can scribble meaningless nonsense on a sheet of paper with a broken crayon, rushing up to their stupid parents thinking that it’s the greatest art-piece ever created. Their parents give the satisfactory answer, and so do the police. They have to pretend that this idiotic child did something noteworthy rather than something inherently mundane, because otherwise they are not fulfilling the fundamental requirements of their job.

Yes, it’s exactly the same. Beyond Birthday wasn’t a toddler. Far from it. He was an artist. A painter, the knife was his paintbrush and flesh was his canvas. An artist ceases to be a person the second they apply paint to paper, or knife to flesh. Their identities get sucked up in their work, to be consumed and picked apart like a dead rat under the critical eye of a bored and undeserving science class. A serial killer isn’t a murderer. A serial killer  _ is  _ the murder. B lured Quarter Queen outside, drugged her and crushed her eyes, in doing so he ceased to be himself. There was no B or Benjamin in this equation anymore, the sacrifice that Mr Wammy and L had created had  _ been  _ sacrificed. All so Beyond Birthday, the artist blessed with sight, could live on and haunt L’s pixelated dreams, rotting away at his mind like the worthless parasite that Beyond Birthday was. 

It’s any artist’s dream to live on through their work, and Beyond Birthday is an artist. He’s not just any artist either, he’s the best at his craft, and he’ll prepare a painting so horrible that it will make the world’s greatest detective turn his dead hollow eyes toward him. And as such he’ll be immortal, even as his own flesh roasts and boils.

“You look so much better with glasses,” Beyond Birthday murmurs to her. It’s true. Sometimes when painting a portrait, artistic license has to be taken in order to make the ugly muse more appealing or else the client is left disappointed. The same goes for mutilating children. And Beyond Birthday was never a forgiving client.

He can feel A’s judgemental eyes on him once more. Beyond hears words that he would say if he were here now,  _ WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS, WhY DIdN’T YoU SaVE ME? _ and B comes back, if only to repeat the old meaningless ritual. He takes the lighter out of his pocket and lights it up to bring it to his hand, marking another scar for his beloved.  _ You shouldn’t nag so much, dear. I’ll be with you soon. Right after my masterpiece, it’s just such a shame you’ll miss it.  _

He takes the cloth he’d been using to clean the prints off of the room, starting with the desk as there is sure to be plenty, and he starts humming an old nursery rhyme to himself. “Did you know that I knew a child like you once?” Beyond smiled. Quarter Queen remained dead. “Oh yes, he had the exact same affliction in his eyes, given that he had none,” He wiped the prints off of the lamp, the inside of the lamp, the batteries. Finishing touches. It all had to be perfect. 

“He was pathetic and docile like you are. Really, he might as well have been dead,” Scrub, scrub, scrub. Any artist worth their salt was a perfectionist, and Beyond Birthday was nothing if not a perfectionist. “Obviously his parents thought the same thing, because who in their right mind could permit such a deformed creature to live?” Beyond let out a quiet chuckle. The girl was watching him now, he’d gotten her attention. Or not. She was dead, after-all. 

“But see,” Beyond stops himself, “I apologise, you don’t see much of anything, do you?”  _ It’s hilarious. _ Perhaps this piece was one of his more comical ones, an inside joke for he, himself and the God of Death who made the grave mistake of marking him. L wasn’t in on any of the jokes, as much as he’d like to be. 

“I saw something in this malformed waste of life, though at the time maybe that wasn’t quite true for- Hehehe, for obvious reasons. But someone did,” Beyond Birthday giggled with childlike glee, “And she painted the walls red with the blood of those arrogant enough to presume to sacrifice to a god they can never understand. And she gave Ben something he’d never lose, a gift! Something better than you could ever possibly imagine...” B’s smile fades. The girl’s thirteenth birthday had been four days before today, her mother had to work. A chill goes up his spine. He remembers meeting a boy, crying at the foot of a christmas tree, with brown hair and brown eyes, with a smile that used to make B’s shrivelled heart ache. He burns his hand again.

He adjusts the glasses. “Did your mother never tell you that it’s impolite to stare?” The laughter inside him rots and dies. A muse wasn’t supposed to stare, especially one without eyes. A painting was never supposed to judge the painter.  _ Please stop looking at me like that.  _ “You look so much better without eyes,” He frowns and rubs his arm sheepishly. “That never quite worked for me, I’m afraid.”

Quarter Queen remained dead.


End file.
